Features

Remembering Ernest MacIntyre’s Contribution to Modern Lankan Theatre & Drama

Published

6 months ago

2026/01/21

Thilina Walpola

MAC & Chandi play reading

Humour and the Creation of Community:

“As melancholy is sadness that has taken on lightness,

so humour is comedy that has lost its bodily weight”. Italo Calvino on ‘Lightness’ (Six Memos for the New Millennium (Harvard UP, 1988).

With the death of Ernest Thalayasingham MacIntyre or Mac, as he was affectionately known to us, an entire theatrical milieu and the folk who created and nourished Modern Lankan Theatre appear to have almost passed away. I have drawn from Shelagh Goonewardene’s excellent and moving book, This Total Art: Perceptions of Sri Lankan Theatre (Lantana Publishing; Victoria, Australia, 1994), to write this. Also, the rare B&W photographs in it capture the intensity of distant theatrical moments of a long-ago and far-away Ceylon’s multi-ethnic theatrical experiments. But I don’t know if there is a scholarly history, drawing on oral history, critical reviews, of this seminal era (50s and 60s) written by Lankan or other theatre scholars in any of our languages. It is worth remembering that Shelagh was a Burgher who edited her Lankan journalistic reviews and criticism to form part of this book, with new essays on the contribution of Mac to Lankan theatre, written while living here in Australia. It is a labour of love for the country of her birth.

Here I wish to try and remember, now in my old age, what Mac, with his friends and colleagues from the University of Ceylon Drama Society did to create the theatre group called Stage & Set as an ‘infrastructure of the sensible’, so to speak, for theatrical activity in English, centred around the Lionel Wendt Theatre in Colombo 7 in the 60s. And remarkably, how this group connected with the robust Sinhala drama at the Lumbini Theatre in Colombo 5.

Shelagh shows us how Bertolt Brecht’s plays facilitated the opening up of a two-way street between the Sinhala and English language theatre during the mid-sixties, and in this story, Mac played a decisive role. I will take this story up below.

I was an undergraduate student in the mid-sixties who avidly followed theatre in Sinhala and English and the critical writings and radio programmes on it by eminent critics such as Regi Siriwardena and A. J. Gunawardana. I was also an inaugural student at the Aquinas University’s Theatre Workshop directed by Mac in late 1968, I think it was. So, he was my teacher for a brief period when he taught us aspects of staging (composition of space, including design of lighting) and theatre history, and styles of acting. Later in Australia, through my husband Brian Rutnam I became friends with Mac’s family including his young son Amrit and daughter Raina and followed the productions of his own plays here in Sydney, and lately his highly fecund last years when he wrote (while in a nursing home with his wife and comrade in theatre, Nalini Mather, the vice-principal of Ladies’ College) his memoir, A Bend in the River, on their University days. In my review in The Island titled ‘Light Sorrow -Peradeniya Imagination’ I attempted to show how Mac created something like an archaeology of the genesis of the pivotal plays Maname and Sinhabahu by Ediriweera Sarachchandra in 1956 at the University with his students. Mac pithily expressed the terms within which such a national cultural renaissance was enabled in Sinhala; it was made possible, he said, precisely because it was not ‘Sinhala Only’! The ‘it’ here refers to the deep theatrical research Sarachchandra undertook in his travels as well as in writing his book on Lankan folk drama, all of which was made possible because of his excellent knowledge of English.

The 1956 ‘Sinhala Only’ Act of parliament which abolished the status of Tamil as one of the National languages of Ceylon and also English as the language of governance, violated the fundamental rights of the Tamil people of Lanka and is judged as a violent act which has ricocheted across the bloodied history of Lanka ever since.

Mac was born in Colombo to a Tamil father and a Burgher mother and educated at St Patrick’s College in Jaffna after his father died young. While he wrote all his plays in English, he did speak Tamil and Sinhala with a similar level of fluency and took his Brecht productions to Jaffna. I remember seeing his production of Mother Courage and Her Children in 1969 at the Engineering Faculty Theatre at Peradeniya University with the West Indian actress Marjorie Lamont in the lead role.

Stage & Set and Brecht in Lanka

The very first production of a Brecht play in Lanka was by Professor E.F. C. Ludowyk (Professor of English at Peradeniya University from 1933 to 1956) who developed the Drama Society that pre-existed his time at the University College by expanding the play-reading group into a group of actors. This fascinating history is available through the letter sent in 1970 to Shelagh by Professor Ludowyk late in his retirement in England. In this letter he says that he produced Brecht’s The Good Woman of Szechwan with the Dram Soc in 1949. Shelagh who was directed by Professor Ludowyk also informs us elsewhere that he had sent from England a copy of Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle to Irangani (Meedeniya/Serasinghe) in 1966 and that she in turn had handed it over to Mac, who then produced it in a celebrated production with her in the role of Grusha, which is what opened up the two way-street between the English language theatre of the Wendt and the Lumbini Theatre in Sinhala. Henry Jayasena in turn translated the play into Sinhala, making it one of the most beloved Sinhala plays. Mac performed in Henry’s production as the naughty priest who has the memorable line which he was fond of reciting for us in Sinhala; ‘Dearly beloved wedding and funeral guests, how varied is the fate of man…’. The idiomatic verve of Henry’s translation was such that people now consider the Caucasian Chalk Circle a Sinhala play and is also a text for high school children, I hear. Even a venal president recently quoted a famous line of the selfless Grusha in parliament assuming urbanely that folk knew the reference.

Others will discuss in some detail the classical and modern repertoire of Western plays that Mac directed for Stage & Set and the 27 plays he wrote himself, some of which are published, so that here I just want to suggest the sense of excitement a Stage & Set production would create through the media. I recall how characters in Mac’s production of Othello wore costumes made of Barbara Sansoni’s handloom material crafted specially for it and also the two sets of lead players, Irangani and Winston Serasinghe and Shelagh and Chitrasena. While Serasinghe’s dramatic voice was beautifully textured, Chitrasena with his dancer’s elan brought a kinetic dynamism not seen in a dramatic role, draped in the vibrant cloaks made of the famous heavy handloom cotton, with daring vertical black stripes – there was electricity in the air. Karan Breckenridge as the Story Teller in the Chalk Circle and also as Hamlet, Alastair Rosemale-Cocq as Iago were especially remarkable actors within the ensemble casts of Stage & Set. When Irangani and Winston Serasinghe, (an older and more experienced generation of actors than the nucleus of Stage & Set), joined the group they brought a gravitas and a sense of deep tradition into the group as Irangani was a trained actor with a wonderful deep modulated voice rare on our stage. The photographs of the production are enchanting, luminous moments of Lankan theatre. I had a brief glimpse of the much loved Arts Centre Club (watering hole), where all these people galvanised by theatre, – architects, directors, photographers, artists, actors, musicians, journalists, academics, even the odd senator – all met and mingled and drank and talked regularly, played the piano on a whim, well into the night; a place where many ideas would have been hatched.

A Beckett-ian Couple: Mac & Nalini

In their last few years due to restricted physical mobility (not unlike personae in Samuel Beckett’s last plays), cared for very well at a nursing home, Mac and Nalini were comfortably settled in two large armchairs daily, with their life-long travelling-companion- books piled up around them on two shelves ready to help. With their computers at hand, with Nalini as research assistant with excellent Latin, their mobile, fertile minds roamed the world.

It is this mise-en-scene of their last years that made me see Mac metamorphose into something of a late Beckett dramatis persona, but with a cheeky humour and a voracious appetite for creating scenarios, dramatic ones, bringing unlikely historical figures into conversation with each other (Galileo and Aryabhatta for example). The conversations, rather more ludic and schizoid and yet tinged with reason, sweet reason. Mac’s scenarios were imbued with Absurdist humour and word play so dear to Lankan theatre of a certain era. Lankans loved Waiting for Godot and its Sinhala version, Godot Enakan. Mac loved to laugh till the end and made us laugh as well, and though he was touched by sorrow he made it light with humour.

Chitrasena & Shelagh as Othelo & Desdemona

And I feel that his Memoir was also a love letter to his beloved Nalini and a tribute to her orderly, powerful analytical mind honed through her Classics Honours Degree at Peradeniya University of the 50s. Mac’s mind however, his theatrical imagination, was wild, ‘unruly’ in the sense of not following the rules of the ‘Well-Made play’, and in his own plays he roamed where angels fear to tread. Now in 2026 with the Sinhala translation by Professor Chitra Jayathilaka of his 1990 play Rasanayagam’s Last Riot, audiences will have the chance to experience these remarkable qualities in Sinhala as well.

Impossible Conversations

In the nursing home, he was loved by the staff as he made them laugh and spoke to one of the charge nurses, a Lankan, in Sinhala. Seated there in his room he wrote a series of short well-crafted one-act plays bristling with ideas and strange encounters between figures from world history who were not contemporaries; (Bertolt Brecht and Pope John Paul II, and Galileo Galilei and a humble Lankan Catholic nun at the Vatican), and also of minor figures like poor Yorik, the court jester whom he resurrects to encounter the melancholic prince of Denmark, Hamlet.

Community of Laughter: The Kolam Maduwa of Sydney

A long life-time engaged in theatre as a vital necessity, rather than a professional job, has gifted Mac with a way of perceiving history, especially Lankan history, its blood-soaked post-Independence history and the history of theatre and life itself as a theatre of encounters; ‘all the world’s a stage…’. But all the players were never ‘mere players’ for him, and this was most evident in the way Mac galvanised the Lankan diasporic community of all ethnicities in Sydney into dramatic activity through his group aptly named the Kolam Maduwa, riffing on the multiple meanings of the word Kolam, both a lusty and bawdy dramatic folk form of Lanka and also a lively vernacular term of abuse with multiple shades of meaning, unruly behaviour, in Sinhala.

The intergenerational and international transmission of Brecht’s theatrical experiments and the nurturing of what Eugenio Barba enigmatically calls ‘the secret art of the performer’, given Mac’s own spin, is part of his legacy. Mac gave a chance for anyone who wanted to act, to act in his plays, especially in his Kolam Maduwa performances. He roped in his entire family including his two grand-children, Ayesha and Michael. What mattered to him was not how well someone acted but rather to give a person a chance to shine, even for an instance and the collective excitement, laughter and even anguish one might feel watching in a group, a play such as Antigone or Rasanayagam’s Last Riot.

A colleague of mine gave a course in Theatre Studies at The University of California at Berkeley on ‘A History of Bad Acting’ and I learnt that that was his most popular course! Go figure!

Mac never joined the legendary Dram Soc except in a silent walk-on role in Ludowyk’s final production before he left Ceylon for good. In this he is like Gananath Obeyesekere the Lankan Anthropologist who did foundational and brilliant work on folk rituals of Lanka as Dionysian acts of possession. While Gananath did do English with Ludowyk, he didn’t join the Dram Soc and instead went travelling the country recording folk songs and watching ritual dramas. Mac, I believe, did not study English Lit and instead studied Economics but at the end of A Bend in the River when he and his mates leave the hall of residence what he leaves behind is his Economics text book but instead, carries with him a copy of the Complete Works of Shakespeare.

I imagine that there was a ‘silent transmission of the secret’ as Mac stood silently on that stage in Shaw’s Androcles and the Lion; the compassionate lion. Mac understood why Ludowyk chose that play to be performed in 1956 as his final farewell to the country he loved dearly. Mac knew (among others), this gentle and excellent Lankan scholar’s book The Foot Print of the Buddha written in England in 1958.

Both Gananath and Mac have an innate sense of theatre and with Mac it’s all self-taught, intuitive. He was an auto-didact of immense mental energy. In his last years Mac has conjured up fantastic theatrical scenarios for his own delight, untrammelled by any spatio-temporal constraints. And so it happens that he gives Shakespeare, as he leaves London, one last look at his beloved Globe theatre burnt down to ashes, where ‘all that is solid melts into air’.

However, I wish to conclude on a lighter note touched by the intriguing epigram by Calvino which frames this piece. It is curious that as a director Mac was drawn to Shakespearean tragedy (Hamlet, Othello), rather than comedy. And it becomes even curiouser because as a playwright-director his own preferred genre was comedy and even grotesque-comedy and his only play in the tragic genre is perhaps Irangani. Though the word ‘Riot’ in Rasanayagam’s Last Riot refers to the series of Sinhala pogroms against Tamils, it does have a vernacular meaning, say in theatre, when one says favourably of a performance, ‘it was a riot!’, lively, and there are such scenes even in that play. So then let me end with Calvino quoting from Shakespeare’s deliciously profound comedy As You Like It, framed by his subtle observations.

‘Melancholy and humour, inextricably intermingled, characterize the accents of the Prince of Denmark, accents we have learned to recognise in nearly all Shakespeare’s plays on the lips of so many avatars of Hamlet. One of these, Jacques in As You Like It (IV.1.15-18), defines melancholy in these terms:

“But it is a melancholy of mine own, compounded of many simples, extracted from many objects, and indeed the sundry contemplation of my travels, in which my often rumination wraps me in a most humorous sadness.”’

Calvino’s commentary on Jacques’ self-perception is peerless:

‘It is therefore not a dense, opaque melancholy, but a veil of minute particles of humours and sensations, a fine dust of atoms, like everything else that goes to make up the ultimate substance of the multiplicity of things.’

Ernest Thalayasingham MacIntyre certainly was attuned to and fascinated to the end by the ‘fine dust of atoms, by the veil of minute particles of humours and sensations,’ but one must also add to this, laughter.

by Laleen Jayamanne ✍️

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Features

Trump’s tariffs, AKD’s gazette and Sri Lanka’s diplomatic slumber

Published

1 day ago

2026/07/17

Thilina Walpola

“We are rather respectable in Colombo. We go to bed fairly early, and we remain there till morning. “

According to Sri Lanka’s diplomatic folklore, the late S.W. R. D. Bandaranaike uttered these words while explaining the reasons for Sri Lanka’s abstention on the UN resolution condemning the Soviet invasion of Hungary. Apparently, SWRD’s foreign ministry officials were asleep at home when the diplomatic cable seeking instructions was received from New York. In those days, there were no cell phones, Internet, or even fax or telex machines. The diplomatic cables were sent through post offices. Decoding them was a slow and time-consuming process. Thus, the government could not provide appropriate instructions to our mission in New York in time, and the Sri Lankan delegation abstained on that sensitive UN vote.

Sri Lanka’s Absence from Section 301 Consultations

But then, how does one explain Sri Lanka’s absence from the crucial bilateral consultation held in Washington by the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) during March-April on “Forced Labour” under the Section 301 of the US Trade Act of 1974? Didn’t our foreign and trade ministries send appropriate instructions to Washington in time? Even if the instructions from the foreign ministry were transmitted to our embassy in Washington by pigeon carriers, there was enough time for Sri Lanka to participate in those meetings.

In March, the USTR initiated these 301 investigations on 60 trading partners, and invited all of them for confidential consultations. Out of the 60, 46 participated in these consultations. Sri Lanka was not one of them. Other countries that didn’t participate in these consultations included China, Russia, and Venezuela! In addition to that, the Section 301 Committee conducted a public hearing with interested parties on April 28 and 29. Washington-based diplomats, representatives from few trade ministries as well as representatives from many foreign trade associations and chambers participated in these hearings. Sri Lanka was once again conspicuously absent.

As a result, when the USTR published the proposed forced labour tariffs on June 2nd, Sri Lanka ended up with a 12.5% duty. Pakistani and Indonesian diplomats participated in these consultations and took appropriate follow-up measures, and managed to enter the 10% duty category. As even a threat of a modest tariff hike could disrupt supply chains and reduce competitiveness, particularly in an industry such as garments, I discussed this issue on 15 June and underscored the importance of Sri Lanka’s participation at the next hearing, which was scheduled to be held from July 7th .

Awakening from Diplomatic Slumber and AKD’s Gazette

Fortunately, Sri Lanka finally awoke from weeks of diplomatic slumber, and Ambassador Mahinda Samarasinghe participated in the public hearing on 9 July, and promised, “…. · We have agreed to the text in our negotiations with the USTR on forced labour, …. The gazette as we speak is being printed and I’m getting the gazette tomorrow morning, and the gazette will be shared with USTR as I get it“.

As promised, President Anura Kumara Dissanayake issued a gazette on 10 July banning the imports of goods produced by forced labour. These new regulations are very similar to what Pakistan and Indonesia enacted in April, after their consultations with USTR in March. Why couldn’t we do it in April? Why did we wait till the very last minute?

Challenges ahead

“War is too important to be left to generals alone,” is a famous saying attributed to former French Premier Georges Clemenceau. Similarly, monitoring our main markets is too important to be left to diplomats alone. The United States is the largest single-country market for Sri Lanka. Therefore, Sri Lankan trade chambers and associations should become more proactive in these markets and participate in these events. For example, the chairman of the Pakistani apparel exporters association participated in the April hearings. Similarly, representatives from the Indian Agricultural and Processed Food Products Export Development Authority, the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry, the Confederation of Indian Industry, and Reliance Industries also participated in July hearings. At an event where each speaker is given only five minutes (strictly enforced), having a number of speakers from a country is an advantage. The presence of industry representatives in these kinds of events also help them understand the market dynamics and the future challenges. This is important, particularly because there will be many more challenges with Trump’s tariffs.

With the gazette issued on 10 July, Sri Lanka has imposed a prohibition on the importation of goods produced with forced labour. Now, the challenge will be to effectively enforce the prohibition. And what are the goods produced with forced labour? The USTR list only focuses on aluminum, cotton, electronics, lithium-ion batteries, rice, and tobacco. However, according to the U.S. Department of Labour, the list is much longer. Hence, this list may change continuously during the next two years and tariffs may fluctuate once again.

So, this is definitely not the time to slumber.

(The writer, a retired public servant, can be reached at senadhiragomi@gmail.com)

by Gomi Senadhira ✍️

Features

Tales of Mystery and Suspense 10 Casino for Sale

Published

1 day ago

2026/07/17

Thilina Walpola

After the overwhelming grotesquerie of J K Rowling’s latest Cormoran Strike novel (written, I should have noted, as the others were, under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith), I thought I should return to the world of fun, and also a much shorter description since this thriller moves quickly without the layers of detail that Rowling engages in.

I then move to the second comic thriller by Caryl Brahms and S J Simon. This, their second story to feature Vladimir Stroganoff and Adam Quill, was Casino for Sale, as lunatic a romp as the first, though without the emphasis on the ballet that characterized A Bullet in the Ballet.

This one begins with the impresario Stroganoff buying a casino cheap from Baron Sam de Rabinovich, only to find that it was a rundown place, not the grand casino of La Bazouche, a resort on the Frenc+h Riviera, as he had initially thought. The grand one belonged to Lord Buttonhooke, and Stroganoff could not compete, until he thought of bringing the Ballet Stroganoff to the casino – which of course leads to Buttonhooke deciding to have ballet performances in his Casino too.

Stroganoff invites Quill to visit him, which Quill decides to do since he has left Scotland Yard, having come into a legacy. No one believes this, and he has to face questions as to what he did to have been sacked, with sympathy for having been found out.

Caryl and Simon

The day he arrives in La Bazouche there is a murder, of a vitriolic critic called Citrolo, in Stroganoff’s office. He had been going to write a damning review of the opening night of the ballet and Stroganoff, when he realizes Citrolo cannot be swayed, drugs him and dictates the review himself to the papers. He leaves Citrolo sleeping and finds him shot the next morning, whereupon he decides to muddy the waters and leave a suicide note and lots of other murder weapons. So much overkill, as it were, of course ensures that he is arrested.

But the excitable French detective who makes the arrest follows up his suggestion that Buttonhooke was also involved, and so the two casino owners find themselves in cells next door to each other, with the detective Gustave quite happy to provide creature comforts for a fee.

Quill decides he must investigate, and finds Gustave most cooperative, since he has a laid back attitude to work. So it is Quill that finds a notebook which makes it clear Citrolo is an accomplished blackmailer, and that there are lots of possible murderers, including Stroganoff’s croupier, who was crooked, Rabinovich, who was now working for Buttonhooke, a confidence trickster called Kurt Kukumber, whose prospectus for a dud gold mine was found in the office and Prince Alexis Artishok who was engaged in a deal to buy diamonds from the ballerina Dyra Dyrakova.

Stroganoff had been trying to get Dyrakova to dance for him, but having done so previously she had refused. But then to Stroganoff’s chagrin she agreed to dance for Buttonhooke. The clearly crooked Artishok had told Buttonhooke’s mistress Sadie Souse, who was not very bright, that Dyrakova possessed diamonds she was willing to sell cheap, and Sadie was determined to have them.

Quill meanwhile finds out that there was a secret passage to Stroganoff’s office, the obvious solution to what had begun as a locked room mystery, and that this was known by almost everyone apart from Stroganoff himself. And then Rabinovich is murdered, just after Gustave had released his two original suspects, leading him to blame Quill for having insisted on that and thus allowing them to kill again.

Soon afterwards Dyrakova arrives, and the town is full of posters announcing that she will appear in the casinos, elaborate posters for either one, since Stroganoff is determined that she will dance for him, and if she does not come willingly, he has devised a scheme to make her do so unwillingly. So, though Buttonhooke has her taken off to his yacht immediately she arrives at the station, Quill along with Arenskaya gets her into a launch and to Stroganoff’s casino, where she performs to tumultuous applause, not knowing for whom she is dancing.

When Quill asked her about the diamonds, she said she had sold them long ago, and that gave Quill the solution to the mystery. Rabinovich had known about this, and Artishok had killed him to prevent Sadie learning it from him, he had killed Citrolo who had recognized him for an accomplished card sharper, not a Russian prince at all. But before he is arrested, he gets away in a boat, and the police launch that pursues him is on the point of catching him up when it runs out of petrol.

Again, lots of excitement, and entertaining references – Gustave grows marrows – and if not quite as brilliant as its predecessor, Casino was certainly a delightful read.

Features

The challenge of being positive about SAARC

Published

2 days ago

2026/07/16

Sahan Weerasooriya

The RCSS forum addressed by SAARC Secretary General Ambassador Md. Golam Sarwar in progress. (Pic courtesy RCSS)

It was a few years back that a former President of Sri Lanka took it on himself to pronounce SAARC ‘dead’. Since then there have been other sections of Sri Lankan opinion that have joined the critics of SAARC and taken the solemn stance that SAARC has indeed died what may be called a natural death.

Their fatalism is understandable. SAARC has failed to meet at heads of government or state level for the past several years to take the SAARC process notably forward. Regional cooperation has more or less been only an appealing idea. No substantive concrete projects have taken off to make the idea a hard reality. ‘Inner paralysis’ seems to be SAARC’s lot. Hence the fatalism in these circles.

However, being one of the worst cash-strapped regions of the world and a teemingly populated one with people virtually left to their devices, what choices do the ‘SAARC Eight’ have other than to try their best to band together and continue with their cooperation efforts, however small they may be?

There is no escaping the mounting debt trap for many of these countries and bankrupt Sri Lanka is a glaring example, but ‘throwing in the towel’ and abandoning themselves entirely to the diktats of the strongest economies and their agencies will prove a ‘living death’ for many countries in the SAARC fold.

The gains may be meagre but giving-up on SAARC cooperation in full would prove self-defeating for the organization and South Asia. Right now, the collective intention ought to be to salvage what the region could from the tenuous cooperative efforts. Moreover, such initiatives could go some distance to generate a degree of goodwill among the Eight and help in sustaining a dialogue process.

Given this backdrop it proved ‘a stich in time’ for the Regional Centre for Strategic Studies (RCSS), Colombo, to recently host the SAARC Secretary General Ambassador Md. Golam Sarwar to a round table discussion on the unifying potential of SAARC and its future possibilities, besides other related issue areas.

Held on June 24th and moderated by RCSS Executive Director and former ambassador Ravinatha Aryasinha, the forum brought together a vibrant, wide ranging audience comprising academicians, diplomats, senior public servants, civil society activists and many others. Following the presentation by Ambassador Golam Sarwar titled, ‘Reigniting SAARC: Achievements, Challenges and the Way Ahead’, a lively Q&A followed.

The above forum could be described as an act of lighting the proverbial ‘candle’ rather than ‘cursing the darkness.’ It surely is a ‘darkness’ that could be seen as daunting considering that the region’s pivotal powers, India and Pakistan, are failing to act in a spirit of accord but are engaged in bitter finger-pointing on a number of questions of vital importance to SAARC.

On the other hand, what is the rest of the region doing to bring the above sides together? It is disappointing that to date the rest of SAARC has failed to launch a major diplomatic drive to bring peace between the feuding regional heavyweights. It needs to act without delay and establish its earnestness and this effort would need to prove SAARC’s staying power in the unfolding months and even years.

In assessing SAARC’s seeming failure local opinion in particular has failed to factor in what could be described as weak leadership. Since Sheikh Mujibur Rahman of Bangladesh, the founding father of SAARC, the region has failed to produce a visionary leader who could advance the SAARC cause with charisma and drive.

Among other reasons, weak leadership accounts considerably for the faltering and stuttering status, as it were, of SAARC. Badly needed are leaders who could go the extra mile, think less of narrow national interests and work diligently towards the collective well being of the region but SAARC’s millions of ordinary people have been made to wait in vain for leaders of such stature. Instead, they have been burdened with politicians who seem to be relishing the apparently moribund state of SAARC.

Looking back, it could be said that it was the dynamic leadership factor that led to the launching of the Non-Aligned Movement and for its sustenance for a few decades. True, it could be seen in some quarters that NAM is no more, but as in the case of SAARC, the former too has been unfortunate to be burdened over the years with politicians who lack the vision and drive to unflaggingly advance the fortunes of the South. NAM and SAARC lack the dynamism and vision of leaders of the stature of Jawaharlal Nehru, for example, to give them the required guidance and intellectual depth.

The reasons are complex for there not being among us currently political leaders with the vision and the steadfast commitment to advance the legitimate interests of the South. However, it could be stated with conviction that the majority of Southern leaders have too easily caved in to the demands of the global North and its financial agencies.

These leaders have failed to see, for instance, that the largely market economy oriented Northern governments would not view with favour a centrist economic model that attaches priority to the interests of the dis-empowered publics of the South. This realization ought to have dawned on the current government in Sri Lanka, for instance, some while ago but it has no choice but to abide by IMF dictates since economic survival at present is unthinkable without the latter’s succour.

Accordingly for SAARC this should be the time for some soul-searching. Priority needs to be attached to ending the feuding between India and Pakistan since at present the material fortunes of the region hinge largely on these regional giants giving peaceful relations among them a try. This is no easy challenge to meet but some daring, visionary diplomacy needs to take hold among the rest of SAARC.

There is some sense in SAARC bringing the peoples of the region together through programs that address their best collective interests. A meeting of minds among SAARC nations could enable SAARC and its agencies to build a region-wide people’s movement for progressive political and economic change that could in turn lead to the region’s political leaders sensitizing themselves more to the neglected needs of their publics.

However, the time is ‘now’ for the initiation of these progressive changes and the voice of SAARC well wishers would need to drown out those of their critics.